1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates in general to communications and, more particularly, to translating an instant message text to telephone speech.
2. Description of Background
Professionals are always on the move; they have busy schedules that are generally packed with numerous meetings. Quite often, a professional finds himself/herself sitting in a meeting that continues to drag on in time. Generally, as the length of the meeting continues to grow in duration the professional becomes less than fully engaged. Normally, at this time, the professional starts to engage in other business activities such as e-mailing and instant messaging colleagues, customers, etc.
For whatever reason, the professional determines that he/she needs to have a really short conversation with someone, for example, the professional is running late to a meeting with a customer and needs to negotiate a change of plans with the customer, or the professional views an announcement on the web that he/she feels should be addressed by himself/herself or a colleague, etc. As such, the professional attempts to contact the other person via instant messaging (IM) but is unsuccessful. E-mail is a viable option but is unlikely to work because of it's batch nature or the other person's intermittent use.
Thus, there is a need for using IM to phone the person and be able to engage in a short conversation with the person where the typed IM is translated to speech. Conversely, the other person's speech is translated to text when the person responds. Since talking in the meeting is rude and the professional does not want to prematurely leave the meeting this would allow the professional to communicate with others outside the meeting while still attending the meeting.